There's no evidence the women are being run by the CIA or whatever. However, there's also no evidence their allegations are true - if there was Assange would not have been told there was no case to answer and allowed to leave the country.

Given the absolute vacuum of evidence in this case, people tend to rely on rules of thumb, estimates of probability and "common sense" judgements to guide them. Common sense says that if you're raped you don't hang out with the guy the next day and throw parties. Probability says it's remarkable that after 39 years of not being a rapist, suddenly within weeks of becoming public enemy number one for political reasons he has not one but two women going after him. And rules of thumb .... if you want to take a guy down, what accusation do you choose? Rape has the advantage that many people presume guilty until .... well until never, really.

Conspiracy? Maybe so, maybe no. Of course it doesn't matter how weak the accusation is if the point is simply to haul him back to Sweden, so he can be extradited to the states - where he will surely be killed either by the state or through a "oops, we failed to stop a vigilate, our bad" type incident.

Unfortunately if there's one thing the leaked cables have shown, it's that European politicians are easily pressured by the US Government to lie to their own people and ignore their own laws. That is why Assange is fighting - in theory, Swedens extradition rules are actually stronger than the UKs. In practice governments will clearly do anything they can to screw him.

What makes you think they'll have a day in court? No prosecutor in their right mind would take this to trial because it boils down to her word against his. She says "he pinned me down", he denies it = no case.

That's why everyone is up in arms about this. The case is incredibly, unbelievably flimsy. It's so incredibly stupid that the weaknesses of the case are the strongest evidence it's not actually a political event. Even if you accept that the things he's accused of are crimes, the chances of proving them beyond reasonable doubt are zero. It's a waste of the courts time.

Well, bear in mind nothing at top secret or above has leaked. So it's hard to know if there's more going on, but it's very likely.

As to the rest, well, the USSR collapsed twenty years ago. What they thought is hardly relevant these days. I don't recall Putin constantly lecturing countries on how they should run themselves.

Not necessarily. I'm currently reading "The authorized history of MI5". It was written by a highly respected historian who was given full access to the files of the British internal intelligence services. It was vetted but the author claims to have been given virtually unrestricted access to the source data. Now it's possible he is lying, but I doubt it. His professional reputation is worth a lot more to him than book sales (it's way too huge and dry to be the next Harry Potter).

I have only got up to about the 1980s (it runs from 1900 up to the present day), but there have been no incidents where MI5 was caught doing anything like what the CIA have done. Lots of embarrassing stories, naturally the highly placed KGB moles were heavily covered, but nothing like kidnapping or torture at all. If such stories have been excised, they've been done in a way that there are no obvious gaps or inconsistencies in an extremely detailed history - so they can't have played a major part.

You can never really know for sure, but claims MI5 and MI6 were implicated in torture have been made, investigated and never stuck. If MI5 was routinely using these strategies, it'd have been very hard to hide it in such a gigantic history (over 1000 pages!). So I strongly suspect there is nothing being hidden.

Actually I have read many of the cables. But let's set the ad hominem attacks aside. You're mixing up people and governments, which is a fatal mistake for a few reasons.

Firstly, I don't work for the government. In theory at least, the government works for me. I pay their taxes and vote them in to do a job. That gives me a right to know what they are doing but nothing gives them (or you) the same right in return. If the government employed me, then of course they would know what I earned, what my job performance was and the contents of my (work) mailbox. Absolutely guaranteed if I was accused of doing something bad they would go take a look at that governmental mailbox - as the contents would arguably be theirs.

Secondly, things that are worth leaking tend to be things which show duplicity. If an organization flat out admits it's evil, there's not much point leaking evidence that it is. Some people have brought up the issue of why are there no Russian cable leaks? Well, when your intelligence agencies sign their assassinations with polonium, there isn't a whole lot of point risking your life to leak a document saying "Yes, Russian intelligence killed him". If nothing happened before nothing will happen now, and besides, anyone with access to that information knows full well what kind of organization they work for. There are no illusions to be broken.

Finally, your argument that I am unrealistic about leaks because I haven't published details of my finances is stupid. This information has no significance at all. I never heard of anyone deliberately leaking payroll of some random company and I'm pretty sure Wikileaks would ignore it if they did. To prove your point, here is the information you requested - I earn a six figure salary, my recent expenditures are dominated by a trip to the USA, my last job performance review was great - thanks for asking - but I was told I need to be a bit less confrontational ;) And finally anything interesting in my Gmail account can be found in public mailing list archives, the rest is mostly autospam and mails from friends and relatives.

See? Nobody gives a crap. Now stop wasting time and go read some more cables.

Also its nice to see the USA is doing pretty much what it claims to be doing.

Hmm, I can't agree. The USA claims to be spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world. Its presidents and senior politicians promote this idea as often as regular people say hello.

But in practice it's doing all kinds of sleazy undemocratic shit. Pressuring governments to break their own laws and lie to their own people. Working to avoid the arrest of CIA agents guilty of deadly incompetence. Screwing with the IPCC for no better reason than "we don't like Iran, he is Iranian, therefore we don't like him".

The reason this is causing saturation coverage throughout the world is that every single day there is a new story of how the USA preaches one thing and does the exact opposite. Not news to people who follow politics and care about this, but the cables are very easy to read, very direct and very plentiful evidence of this. I've read some people wondering why Russian cables haven't leaked. Maybe it's because Russia doesn't claim to be some paragon of moral superiority to the world so its government employees don't have any illusions to be shattered.

It's not technically Assange that decides what leaks. It's people with access to the data who leak. Some people are painting this as an attack on diplomacy itself, but it's not and can never be. Assange doesn't have magical powers to shut down diplomatic dialogue as he is merely the messenger, not the message.

The story of the cables is very simple. A young, idealistic and (yes) rather naive young private who had been told his entire life that the USA was the light and the good in the world joined the military. There, he found he had access to everything. What he discovered is story after story of abuse of power shielded by secrecy, abuses that disgusted him. We know this because he said so himself. He decided to do something about it, and did.

If all there'd been in this archive was an occasional rude diplomat do you really think it would have leaked at all? Probably not. Manning didn't seem like an unhinged anarchist to me. He seemed like somebody angry about what he read, somebody who correctly thought others would agree.

The easiest way to protect yourself from Wikileaks is to ensure your organization doesn't do anything worth leaking. Simple as that.

Info about Gingerbread

Yes this whole "people should govern themselves" business can be rather messy and complicated, can't it. Benign (?) dictatorship does tend to result in stability .... along with a lot of other less desirable things.

You realize that's what your "pax americana" argument boils down to, right?

You're assuming that the benevolent dictator model results in better security. But we have that in the desktop/laptop OS space in which Microsoft and Apple duke it out between them. Guess what - Apples track record of patching security flaws is absolutely atrocious. They have a reputation for leaving bugs unpatched for months. Microsoft do a lot better these days, but even then, there are so many exploits, and enough users who don't get the online updates, that the OS is a piece of Swiss cheese.

Today, HTC/Motorola/Samsung etc aren't that great about distributing updates quickly. But they're new to this game, much newer than Apple or Microsoft are. There's nothing to say that in future, HTC won't be the fastest gun in town when it comes to security ..... if they begin to see it as a competitive advantage rather than a hidden cost.

Who knows? Maybe it was in fact reported as abusive. Or maybe Facebook are indeed trying to control the conversation and I'm wrong.

My point is people routinely report all kinds of things as spam. It's not uncommon for services to become identified as spammy even though the people running them don't think they're spammers. People hit "report spam" on anything they don't want, basically, especially if they can't figure out a way to get rid of it easily. For instance legit bulk mailers that have a poor unsubscribe implementation (eg requires you to sign in) sometimes develop bad reputations.

Anti-spam is complicated and I've ridden shotgun on more than one "zomg [big company] is marking [random thing] as spam it must be a conspiracy" type stories. Censorship is never the actual cause. Perhaps Facebook is the exception, but I doubt it.